Nightly & Daily: Planned Parenthood, and Police Bias

The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore

Larry dove into a hot-button issue, as he is wont to do, with a segment about a congressional hearing on Planned Parenthood. On Tuesday, the organization’s president, Cecile Richards, was questioned by congressional lawmakers for five hours. “Five hours?” Larry asked, “What was there to say? Is abortion legal? Yes. Oh. Okay what do we do for four minutes and 59 minutes.” But of course that was not what happened. The object of Larry’s bite was not that Planned Parenthood was being investigated, but the way in which the hearing was handled, saying, “Five hours is a long time to let the president of Planned Parenthood speak. Nice that they let her get her point across,” before showing numerous clips of her being interrupted by every member of the committee. Rep. John Duncan, a Tennessee Republican, asked, “Surely you don’t expect us to be easier on you because you’re a woman?” which, of course, didn’t go over well with anyone. Larry pointed out that the point of the hearing wasn’t about listening, it was about the theater of it. Richards was asked if she defended the sale of baby body parts, and Larry wondered hyperbolically, “Why would anyone want to sell baby body parts when leasing is an option?” which garnered a few groans from the audience. There were a few times that Larry had nothing to say other than to point out the attitude of the committee. The oddest moment of the hearing, though, came when Rep. Jason Chaffetz tried to pass of a doctored an ridiculously misleading graph off as truth in a congressional hearing. Larry could only emit a baffeled response. “You can’t just make up how charts work. Otherwise you could prove anything that way,” like placing the amount Arctic Sea Ice on earth against the quality of Best Exotic Marigold Hotel movies. If correlation equals causation, Dame Judi Dench has some explaining to do.

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The Daily Show with Trevor Noah

This segment used two correspondents, one black and one white, each representing the extreme opinions of his race, to expose the difficulty of talking about race relations, “especially when cops are involved.” Trevor showed a string of clips from news shows of correspondents talking about Black Lives Matter versus All Lives Matter, using some pretty explosive rhetoric to discuss the problem. “It’s almost as if there is no common ground,” said Trevor. “It’s almost as if this whole problem is just black and …oh.” He then hands it over Jordan Klepper and Roy Wood Jr. to sit down with cops and investigate police bias training programs to find out why cops are “Racist,” says Wood, while Klepper shouts, “Under attack!” Watch how that played out below.

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Caleb is the founder of The Lanx. He is a scholar of satire with a Master's focused in satiric rhetoric, propaganda, and political cartoons. He also studied comedy and satire at Second City and UCB. He runs The Lanx from Los Angeles.
calebstenzinger.com

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